I like most people, I suspect, especially software architects and programmers, dream of white boards on every wall floor to ceiling. I have wanted this for some time for my office so I could doodle hours away in my office getting dizzy on the dry erase fumes. In the past I had looked for a quality product and failed, until now. Visiting my undergraduate college (St. Olaf) the computer science for it’s brand new shared building has for entire rooms painted a white board surface onto the walls. STUNNING! Want to convey an idea, design a group project, doodle, noodle, or whatever, just walk up to a wall. I hope it holds up and I hope to get around to painting my office soon. I think they are using one of the more expensive products, IdeaBoard, but I am emailing the school to double check.

Finally a canvas large enough to hold all of the crazy UML diagrams and brainstorms.

Martin Fowler and Markus Völter on DSLs – JAOO Conference Somewhat interesting discussion by some DSL leaders. There is a small bias around a specific vendor’s software, but interesting to listen too.

What they talked about, my notes:
DSLs:

  • Internal
  • External
  • IDE/Language Workbench
  • MDA is vaporware

Eclipse GMF/EMF/Textual Languages
CASE Tools, COBOL, Fantasy that programmers are not needed.
Levels of DSL/DSM tooling – Documentation/Testing/Execution
Custom Syntax (External DSL) vs Internal Syntax (Internal DSL , Lisp/Ruby)
Method Chaining, Cool!
1 notation or many notations
(Excel, Boxes and Lines, etc) Power in how to combine the notations.
Divergence, Experimentation, and then Convergence.
UML is not a factor, so they think.

Here is the book in progress that Martin Fowler references, it was in draft form at time of my writing this post. Fowler’s DSL book draft